Santa Monica stands alone

Santa Monica stands alone

With its waterfront location, hipster vibe and pedestrian-friendly atmosphere, this L.A. community serves as a great stress reliever in the otherwise frantic City of Angels.

If you’re lucky, you might catch a movie being made during the Studio Tour of the Universal Studios backlot.Dan MacMedan

With its waterfront location, hipster vibe and pedestrian-friendly atmosphere, this L.A. community serves as a great stress reliever in the otherwise frantic City of Angels.
The Third Street Promenade is the heart and soul of Santa Monica and is alive with activity from morning to night.

With those words I set in motion the eye rolls and knowing smirks of derision that parents are all too familiar with.

“Yeah, whatever dad,” was the unspoken rejoinder in my two children’s mannerisms as we entered the city limits of this L.A. beachside enclave.

Our plan was to use Santa Monica as the base of operations for exploring Los Angeles proper, specifically from the Fairmont Miramar Hotel and Bungalows, but as it turned out we discovered that this city within the City of Angels offers more than enough to keep a family occupied without ever getting in a car.

Play “Santa Monica” word association with most people, and “Pier” and “that Sheryl Crow song” will top the list. And while the famed amusement park jutting into the sea and the Santa Monica Boulevard are both major elements of the place, there’s much more going on for tourists to enjoy.

The city is also a playground for celebrities, a fact quickly underscored by the camera-clutching paparazzi perched outside the trendy restaurants that line Santa Monica streets.

Which brings us to our first celebrity sighting, which occurred not five minutes into our arrival at the Fairmont. Checking in at the guest counter, I noticed a well-tanned and muscular man in a golf shirt making his way to the outdoor lunch patio.

“There you go,” I said matter-of-factly to my wife and two kids, “there’s Arnold Schwarzenegger.”

“Yeah right,” said my preteen boy. “That’s not him.”

“Yes it is,” said the clerk, her eyes never leaving her computer screen. “He comes here once a week for the fish tacos.”

Welcome to Santa Monica.

Shifting to Third

The automobile is to Los Angeles what the umbrella is to Vancouver, but we quickly discovered that Santa Monica — at least the 20 square blocks bordered by the Pacific Ocean, Wilshire Boulevard (where the Fairmont is located), 5th Street and Colorado Avenue (which ends at the beach as the Santa Monica Pier) — is built for walking. Armed with a Downtown Santa Monica walking map, we headed out from the Fairmont into the warm afternoon to explore.

Two blocks up Wilshire, we turned right on 3rd Street, and onto the Third Street Promenade. This three-block stretch is closed to vehicle traffic and is the heart and soul of Santa Monica.

Most every trendy brand you can think of has a shop here — from Apple to Tesla and Armani, and from Adidas to Benetton and The Gap — and restaurant patios, street entertainers and art galleries give the strip a lively pulse from morning to night.

There’s a wide range of dining choices for families and, from a patio table, the parade of locals and tourists provides endless people-watching fun.

We also happened upon the Santa Monica Farmers Market, which for 30 years has been attracting Angelenos from far and wide. It’s set up four days a week, and the Main Street one on Sunday mornings is the place to be seen for breakfast, with made-to-order omelettes, crepes, fresh-baked food and specialty coffees. There’s also pony rides for kids.

Pier Pressure

Try as we might, we felt the tug, mostly on our shirt sleeves, of the Santa Monica Pier.

The Pacific Park on the pier is an amusement park with all the trappings, from fair food to games of chance, and rides that include a roller coaster and that iconic Ferris Wheel. Think Playland on a pier.

Another popular pier attraction is the beach-level aquarium and, with a suggested donation admission of $5 for an adult, it is well worth checking out.

If stomach churning rides aren’t your thing, the pier, like so much of Santa Monica, is a great people-watching place, from the anglers at the end of the pier to the surfers carving it up below.

At night the pier comes alive with neon lights and a festive family feeling, and the views of L.A. from the top of the ferris wheel make for great photos.

santamonicapier.com

Wheels to Go

Another must-do here is to rent a bike or pair of roller blades from Perry’s Café and Rental on the beach and take to the South Bay Bicycle Trails.

At 35.5-kilometres in length, the paved trail is the world’s longest oceanfront bike path, and starts in the north and Malibu, proceeds through Santa Monica beach and ends in Torrance.

We picked up the trail at Perry’s, just south of the pier, and leisurely cycled on our beach cruisers to Venice Beach, that legendary community that for decades has been a cultural hub of Los Angeles. The early L.A. beat poets hung out here, and through the years it has been home to other iconic SoCal subcultures, from muscle beach to skateboards to punk rock.

The ride from the pier to Venice takes about 20 minutes, and plan on getting off your bikes once you get there because you’ll want to check out the diverse array of vendors hawking T-shirts, tattoos, tacos and fortune telling. The rental bikes come with locks.

The skate park is where the pioneering Z-Boys honed their tricks, and it still attracts some of the best — and bravest — skaters on the planet.

labikepaths.com

In Studio

After a couple of days exploring Santa Monica, it was time to strike out further afield, and that meant a drive through L.A. to Universal Studios Hollywood, a combination of theme park and movie studio which provides an action-packed day immersion into the magic of movies.

We went for Front of Line Passes, which are more expensive than general admission but were worth it. Instead of an hour-long wait at the most popular attractions — Transformers 3-D and The Simpsons Ride — our longest wait was 10 minutes. Often we were quite literally at the front of the line. And that’s a good thing if you want to experience the 14 attractions in one day.

Highlights for us were the Waterworld show — in which actors you might just recognize put on an amazing performance in a water-filled playland that features huge pyrotechnics, speeding jet skis and even a flying plane — and the Transformers and The Simpsons Rides — which no description can give justice.

Best of all, and a little surprisingly, was the Studio Tour, in which you ride in buses through the famed backlot studio. It takes you through sets from westerns to Wisteria Lane, and there’s interactive sections where you come face to face with Norman Bates, the shark from Jaws and special effects from the Fast and the Furious. A plane crash scene from War of the Worlds must be seen to be believed and the King Kong 360 3-D segment will leave you sweating and squirming in your seat.

Disneyland may very well be the happiest place on earth, but Universal Studios Hollywood is one of the most exciting, particularly for movie buffs.

universalstudioshollywood.com

Ancient L.A.

After experiencing that ultra-modern aspect of Los Angeles, the next morning we headed into the heart of the city and one of the oldest, most interesting features in the basin.

The La Brae tar pits formed as asphaltum, or tar, seeped up from the ground over the course of tens of thousands of years.

During these millenniums, animals became trapped in the ooze and their fossils have revealed a treasure trove for scientists. Among the creatures found are mammoths, giant bison, camels, horses, sabre-tooth cats, lions, jaguars and cheetahs. A woman’s remains have also been unearthed.

In addition to touring the tar pits, the on-site Page Museum provides an interactive educational experience that includes many of the animals found in the pits, and the fish bowl laboratory allows visitors to watch scientists and volunteers restore and catalogue the fossils that are unearthed on a daily basis.

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